Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl #2,3) by William Gibson

I admit that I find Gibson to be rather oblique reading. I first read Neuromancer for CBR IV, and I wasn’t really motivated to read the rest of the Sprawl books for a number of reasons. But I really like the *idea* of cyberpunk, and after watching Netflix’s Altered Carbon I thought I might give some abandoned cyberpunk series another chance, including this one and, yeah, the Takeshi Kovacs books. I don’t remember Neuromancer all too well, but from what I do remember, some of the super esoteric Gibson-ness appears to have been dialed back in both Count Zero and […]

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

What does society look like if your consciousness can be saved to a device and installed into a new body making death theoretically impossible? While this sounds like the plot of an episode of Black Mirror, it’s actually the main conceit of Altered Carbon, published in 2006 (and adapted into a series on Netflix this year). At birth, every human has a cortical stack implanted at the base of the skull that contains their consciousness. Only the destruction of the stack results in what’s known as Real Death. It’s in this world that we meet Takeshi Kovacs, a former […]

Company Town by Madeline Ashby

This is a noir, cyber-punk, mystery and has a lot of great ideas jammed into it, but I don’t think the execution is quite there. Ashby does play a bit with the noir tropes, reversing roles and changing the tone to be a bit more humorous and I liked that quite a bit, however there’s just so much in the novel that nothing really gets done well. There are a lot of characters, a lot of plot, and a lot of genres all fighting for attention. I do need to be honest and say that I skimmed (ok, skipped almost […]

Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs #1) by Richard K. Morgan

3.5 stars Altered Carbon is a technically great book that I liked, but didn’t completely click for me in a way that I expected it to. Its premise drew me in, and the stylistic excellence of Richard K. Morgan’s prose lends itself equally well to technobabble, gritty noir dialogue, and surrealism. He’s also created a compelling, hyper-competent lead character in Takeshi Kovacs, who plays up the strong and silent thing to great effect but also employs cutting, dark humor with aplomb. The idea is this: in the future, the essense of individual humanity — the soul — is able to […]

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Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong

I can’t stress how much I loved this book. In many ways, it serves as a companion to Ready Player One. It follows Zoe Ashe from a life of poverty in a suburban trailer park through a terrifying hunt to an inheritance she didn’t know awaited her. It has the same basic plot as the aforementioned book (which I reviewed earlier in the year), but diverges in a number of distinct ways. For starters, the protagonist here is a woman. I don’t think that’s a small point, either. In fact, I think this is the only book I’ve read this […]

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Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Straight up, I did not like this book. It’s not quite worthy of the one star treatment, though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because the actual construction of his sentences, the literal writing, is not bad. Second, because the underlying story remains one I think interesting to explore in book form. And third, because I truly believe that one star ratings should be reserved for books that really go beyond the pale in their awfulness, not just slapping that on there because I didn’t happen to like them. I know Snow Crash belongs in this latter category, even though I […]

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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

I think I might be too stupid to write this review. Long story short: This book was a hell of a ride. It was slightly problematic as a novel, but damn if it wasn’t powerful anyway. It should probably be required reading. Long story long? Weeeeeellll. That’s when my brain starts to make whirring and booping noises and then I want to put my laptop away and go to sleep. Or eat a milkshake. Either one of those things, really. Marcus Yallow is a seventeen year old in near-future San Francisco. When a terrorist attack hits the city, he and […]

Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

So I finally read Alif the Unseen. Wow — what a genre-bender. So many questions about belief, ideology, loyalty, technology, humanity, and identity are explored across multiple metaphysical planes and in achingly familiar real-world contexts. To back up to a plot summary, which I’ll ape from Goodreads: “In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for […]